You can tell Kirby Air Riders is a Masahiro Sakurai passion project because it has a mode filled with photo-realistic food PNGs. Also because Nintendo gave him almost two hours of Directs to promote it. It's mostly the PNG thing, though. It's something he's been putting into Super Smash Bros. for years, and in both Air Riders and Smash, the value of the food you eat is dictated by how calorific the items are in real-life.
A post on the Air Riders' Twitter account confirmed that, when collecting power-ups to prepare for the next minigame in City Trial, the HP you recover from eating food along the way is dictated by how many calories that food has in the real world. Find the lettuce, for example, and the health you recover will be negligible. Wolf down a burger, on the other hand, and you'll get a significant chunk of your HP back.
Sakurai chipped in by replying to the tweet to reveal that this isn't a new concept exclusive to the latest Kirby game. It's previously been the case in Super Smash Bros, although the veteran developer didn't go as far as to say how many Smash...
